Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox - How to Run a Successful Kickstarter

January 29th, 2013, 17:27

Alex Norton has given a 90 minute lecture last year on how he made his pledge on Kickstarter for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox a success, raising over 500% of it's original pledge. There is a video of 90 minuntes covering this lecture, which might be a bit long, so he summarized it in an editorial for Gamasutra.
He makes some valid points on running a successful kickstarter not addressing the point that he only asked for $6000 to start with, which made raising a lot more maybe a bit easier compared to those who are asking $30.000 to start with.

After doing significant research on other, more successful, crowd-funded projects, I came to the following conclusions:

- Communication is key! Talk to your pledgers and potential customers. Answer their questions when they have them and keep them engaged.

- It all comes down to how you sell your product, and how you sell yourself and your team as people.

- Be aware of your target audience and gear every little thing you do towards them and only them.

- Market your campaign. Send links to blogs, reviewers, journals, magazines and spread it across social networks. Get traffic to it.

- Be willing to put in the hours that it takes to make regular updates, answer all questions and keep the customer engaged at all times.

On top of this, I decided to change my tactics to include the following:

- Show the customer that the project is being made by people. Good quality, friendly, nice people. If they like you, they'll be more inclined to like what you're selling.

- Don't just show them why your product is special. Show them why it's special to YOU, and why it should be special to THEM.

- When you're selling your product, you should also be selling the people making it. It makes the customer feel a part of something, rather than a simple ‘browse and buy' scenario.

- Write lots of updates. At LEAST 3 per week. Show them you're working at it. Show them how dedicated you are. Try and use video where possible. People respond to video. Get your best speaker onto it.

- Talk to the pledgers, not just as someone who answers questions, but really engage them in conversation. Show them you're real.